Parades, cheers, flags: Wooden limbs, blindness, widows, orphans, poverty, soldiers’ homes, asylums.... “_Daybreak_” It would be easy enough to be disappointed in the last volume of _Pelle the Conqueror_ if you did not go any deeper than the story. It is so silent. All the people seem to be gone—all the people who passed through the other books like a dark secret procession, each carrying his story in his hands. You miss the sounds of the many, many footsteps,—the heavy footsteps of the workers, the fagged footsteps of the women, the searching footsteps of the children, and the wandering footsteps of the godforsaken, which made a dull pattern of sound behind the story of Pelle. In this book the strong confident footfall of Pelle strikes out clear against the faint fall of those who walk beside him or those who walk far off. It is only when you have finished the book that the design of the whole story becomes clear and perfect: the design back of the life of man. In his childhood he walked with animals; in his youth he gathered to himself knowledge and those after his own heart; in his manhood he became a leader of multitudes; and then, forsaken by all, in solitude he found his own soul. For those who wish to read it that way _Pelle the Conqueror_ may be a labor novel. But it seems to me that through all the story Nexö has gone the stronge way of the artist and not the strict way of the reformer. Here in the last volume he leaves the labor question,—leaves the question as to whether Pelle’s cooperative workshop is the solution or whether his working-men’s homes are a success—as part of something that will work out its own fate or be worked out by the Pelles of the world. It is not something he has been teaching or solving. It is something he has been creating. Out of the drama of material poverty he has created the more profound tragedy of the poor-in-heart. And as if he could never forget them he turns to them again. With a few reluctant stories of prison life told by Pelle he makes the prison loom against our lives like “that dark mill over hell, grinding misery into crime.” And then, so that _you_ may never forget, he chooses—not with that mere truth which is life but with that absolute truth which is Art—the child of the lovely dreaming Hanne, whom life so ironically sacrificed, to be again a sacrifice. The story of the death of this petulant child of little airs and sudden angers, of her pathetic and furious wrestle with the ghastly memories of her life, bites into your heart and you are maddened by the brutality of the life that takes away everything before it has given anything. I should like to tell all over again why I think this book is _the_ novel—greater than _Jean-Christophe_, _Jacob Stahl_, or any of them. _A Blow!_